The CIA now reigns supreme in the international narcotics trade arena. Inevitably, the agency will further infect us with the drug plague; that's simply the way it does business.

The FBI is all but out of the narcotics game, gutted in the May-June battle over who was to blame for September 11. Somebody had to pay for the Bush administration's falling poll numbers, as the facts surrounding the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks finally began to assemble themselves under full public gaze.

All Americans - Black Americans, especially - should be terrified at the CIA's bureaucratic victory. In the course of more than half a century, the agency's European, Asian and Latin American adventures have led directly to the establishment and continual expansion of the global drug trafficking network. We have now reached the point at which U.S. resistance to the drug trade comes to a full stop.

With the CIA in charge, the War on Drugs is over.

The effective surrender came in late May, when FBI Director Robert Mueller announced that 400 drug agents would be "redirected" to the all-encompassing War on Terror. In addition, the CIA would play a larger role in the FBI's own "intelligence analysis" functions, thus penetrating the J. Edgar Hoover Building, itself. The spook agency's victory was complete.

The FBI's role on the domestic side of the drug trade - that is, what happens to narcotics once they have penetrated U.S. borders - has been seriously curtailed. FBI drug task force manpower is to be reduced by up to two-thirds.

Much more critically, only the CIA will have the resources to track the global drug highways. The Drug Enforcement Administration is puny by comparison, and counts for nothing in President Bush's bogus War on Terror. The DEA has always gotten stomped in turf conflicts with the CIA.

Under this new regime, the world is the CIA's oyster, and the drug lords are its friends. The agency's deepening and multiplying alliances in Latin America and Asia insure that cocaine and heroin will flood the United States in unprecedented quantities.

There is, literally, no one with the will or resources to stem the worldwide flow of drugs into our cities and towns. In a real sense, Bush's war has succeeded in defeating the American people.

The criminals are in charge

In the April 5 issue of Black Commentator, we described the CIA as the virtual architect of the international drug trade. (See Make This Amendment) This air, land and sea highway was established through successive American Cold War deals with criminals, beginning with the Italian and French mobsters who proved so helpful in undermining strong socialist and communist European movements after World War Two. The gangsters were rewarded with impunity in setting up their new drug networks, including the famed French Connection. The CIA was born into a world of narco-dealing intrigue, in which the agency became a central player. Dope gained a strong foothold in the ghettos of the U.S. The CIA made it possible.

The Vietnam War saw the CIA evolve into the international arbiter of the heroin trade. Its Laotian, Thai and Burmese allies were nothing more than heroin traffickers with guns. The CIA's vast logistical resources were placed at the disposal of the drug armies, while client governments facilitated passage of massive shipments through their ports. Over the space of only a few years and under the agency's guidance, the Asian heroin trade increased tenfold! That's how the CIA's armies got paid.

The same formula was later applied in Afghanistan. By now, most Americans are aware that the $2 - $3 billion the U.S. provided to anti-Soviet fighters - almost entirely administered by the CIA - eventually gave us the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. However, the devastation wrought in American cities was immediate. The CIA's Afghan and Pakistani friends, operating with total impunity, took only two years to capture 60% of the U.S. heroin market, from 1979 to 1981.

CIA Afghan chief Charles Cogan dismissed the domestic narcotics disaster. "I don't think that we need to apologize for this," Cogan told the press, in 1995. "Every situation has its fallout."

Back in Afghanistan with a vengeance, the Bush administration is following the lead of the very same CIA agents that brought high quality, cheap heroin to American streets in the early 1980s. Some of these agents are getting old, but the post-September 11 call to arms put them back in business, as reported by USA Today on June 17:

The agency pulled hundreds of retired officers back to active duty, especially those who had worked in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion there in 1979….

The CIA officers brought with them language proficiency, interrogation skills and Afghanistan expertise that the commandos could not match. They also had clearance to do some things the soldiers could not: hand out large satchels of cash and call in weapons drops to buy information and allegiances from Afghan fighters.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld cannot contain his euphoria at the scope and speed of America's deployment of "advisors" everywhere he can find a landing field - most of them either CIA or under agency supervision. (Special Forces troops often operate under direct agency control.) "That is why we're cooperating with Pakistan, that's why we're training people in Yemen and in Georgia and in the Philippines, for them to be able to do a better job of going after them - the terrorists," Rumsfeld told the New York Times, June 17.

Nothing has changed in the past two decades, except the designated enemy. Soviets or "terrorists," it's all the same to Rumsfeld, the man with the corporate executive smile, and Bush, the guy with the crooked one. We refer the reader to the April 5 issue of The Black Commentator:

We must now expect a narcotics onslaught from multiple points around the globe, simultaneously. In the guise of a war on terrorism - which means whatever George Bush wants it to mean - and at breakneck speed, the U.S. is setting up shop in several former Soviet Central Asian republics, as well as the former Soviet Georgia, in the Caucasus. The official excuse is anti-terror, the real reason is oil and natural gas, but the end result will be tons of poppy derivatives bound for the United States: the "fallout."

Indonesia, Yemen and the Philippines are also great places for cultivating drug enterprises to pay off foreign collaborators in the world war on "terror." U.S. intelligence agencies are there, in force, looking for recruits in dark places. We have an idea how they will be compensated. The same actors that brought us the previous drug epidemics are in charge of these far-flung outposts, employing identical modus operandi, infecting yet more regions of the world with their fatal touch.

Standing truth on its head

Certainly, little has changed in Colombia in the two decades since Reagan and his war-dog, Oliver North, tapped and vastly enhanced the CIA's cocaine connections to fund the murderous war against Nicaragua. The U.S. crack cocaine epidemic erupted at precisely this time, the early to mid-1980s.

The Colombian government remains soaked in cocaine money - the archetypal narco-regime - while the guerillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC, in the Spanish acronym) are limited to taxing the raw coca crops of the peasants in FARC territories.

Yet, the U.S. corporate media relentlessly repeat as fact Bush's bald lie, that FARC guerillas control the drug trade. This is nonsense. The guerillas dominate remote areas in about a quarter of the country - taxing peasants is about all they can handle. The real international drug trade, which refines, packages, markets and ships the final coca product, is run from offices like any other multi-billion dollar export business, not from jungle hideouts. Cocaine travels to the U.S. in planes, ships and Mexican trucks. The FARC have no air force, no navy, no seaports - in other words, the guerillas have no access to U.S. or Europeans drug markets.

Rich ranchers fund the right-wing private paramilitaries that kill most of the civilian victims of Colombia's 40-year long civil war. The Colombian army closely coordinates its operations with the paramilitaries. The ranchers are at the heart of the Colombian drug machinery. Export-import is their business. Their vast estates are both military bastions and hubs of the cocaine economy, complete with air and surface transportation links to coastal cities. Thissemi-feudal aristocracy will soon enjoy outright rule over the country, in the person of Alvaro Uribe Vélez, who will be inaugurated President in August. Heir to a family of rich ranchers, Uribe is backed by Washington and endorsed by the major U.S. media. George W. Bush's Latin American champion in the War on Terror is, in fact, the charismatic leader of the cocaine barons.

The U.S. has never intercepted any FARC drug shipments. Ever. Such shipments simply do not exist, because FARC is not a player in the international drug game.

George Bush, Condoleezza Rice and the entire, shameless media chorus scream wild fictions in the face of truth. They are absolutely unconcerned that the rest of the world knows perfectly well that they are lying. The Bush administration's propaganda, like Colombia's drugs, is strictly for U.S. domestic consumption.

The FARC must be narco-terrorists, because George Bush says so. Up is down, and down is up.

Governance by lying

The CIA thrives in this Alice in Wonderland world. The Drug Enforcement Administration, on the other hand, deserves our sympathy, even pity. The DEA is made up of cops who don't stand a chance of carrying out real police work in the CIA's domain. On June 19, the DEA's dedicated lawmen were reduced to weak mimicry of the White House political line, as they announced a "first" in the decades-long war against Colombia's FARC guerillas, the purported kingpins of cocaine:

DEA Director Asa Hutchinson today announced the arrest of Carlos Bolas, a Colombian national and a leader of the Colombian narco-terrorist group, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionaries de Colombia (FARC), for drug trafficking….

For the first time we have not only indicted a member of a terrorist organization involved in drug trafficking, but we have also arrested him.

Bolas, who may or may not be a high-ranking member of FARC, was arrested in the airport of the capital city of Suriname, one of South America's least influential countries. He and three companions, also alleged to be FARC, were not in possession of any drugs. They had been picked up for carrying false passports. Bolas was later found to be on a U.S. wanted list and was turned over to the Americans.

The airport event represents the sum total evidence of narco-trafficking by FARC, a movement that has been fighting for two generations against the rulers of their country, the cocaine capital of the world. Colombia is also the third biggest recipient of U.S. aid dollars, right behind Israel and Egypt. Any sane person must realize that the U.S. is on the wrong side of the Colombian war, and that no American War on Drugs exists. In our April 5 issue, the Black Commentator discussed the consequences of this betrayal:

Ultimately, our own people, neighborhoods and institutions will sicken and die, "fallout" victims in far greater numbers than perished at the World Trade Center….

We are most concerned about the permanent civil strife that drugs have brought to the United States: the one million men and women of color behind bars, largely because of drugs; the neighborhoods and entire cities rendered economically unviable by successive drug plagues; the drug-fueled AIDS crisis; the narco-based police state tactics that have been routine in African American communities since long before the World Trade Center was destroyed; the Black-on-Black crime that has disfigured basic human relations among our people. The list goes on, endlessly.

This is the terror that stalks Black America. This is the battle that demands our uncompromising commitment. We will get nowhere unless we force a change in U.S. foreign policy. That can only come from the U.S. Congress.

The U.S. is now at the beginning of the fifth wave of CIA-facilitated drug inundations. The first, born of the agency's post-World War Two collaboration with European mafia, established the trans-Atlantic heroin route. Next came the CIA's most notable contribution to the Vietnam War, the massive Southeast Asian connection that produced the Great Heroin Epidemic of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Less than a decade later, Afghan and Pakistani allies of the CIA flooded the inner city with more potent and cheaper heroin. Just a few years later the fourth wave broke over America, as crack cocaine made its debut, courtesy of the CIA's associates in Latin America.

The fifth flood has begun. It is already too late to stop it, and there is no U.S. agency that is capable of intervening on our behalf. Bush's global war has left the American public naked to an entire world of drug sources. New routes are being established as you read this commentary. The CIA sits atop its white powder mountain, dispensing impunity to its criminal friends.

Now you know what was at stake in the CIA-FBI bureaucratic war in Washington, four weeks ago. The bad guys won - big time. September 11 wasn't really the issue.

Note: To read the official announcement by the DEA Director of the arrest of FARC member please go to the link below:

http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/pressrel/pr061902.html

 

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